


Five (Or More) Places to Die

by softieghost



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Adolescent Sexuality, Coming of Age, Genderfluid Character, Genderfluid Yuri Plisetsky, Growing Up, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, also nikolai is a good person but he's old and yuri doesn't know how to read him all the time, i promise nikolai isn't a misogynist, rated m because of a brief depiction of sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-11-29 05:48:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11434443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softieghost/pseuds/softieghost
Summary: In childhood most things feel like the end of the world. They aren't, but it doesn't mean it hurts any less to be misunderstood.





	Five (Or More) Places to Die

Yuri Plisetsky died for the first time when he was twelve after he saw two men kissing in an old movie during class. It was an American film from the 1920s and Miss Petrovna made them watch it as part of a lesson. He died in his seat, freshly expired, and advanced into rigor mortis immediately – back straight up, breathing stilled, hands clasped so tight he had little semi-circle lines of blood etched into his palms for a week. His heart felt cold in his chest for days as he pictured the scene over and over until he could warm it up again with a jump from ballet class – a girl with pink tights that looked like her skin danced around him and smelled like cheap children’s cosmetics – stick on earrings and blue, patchy eyeshadow. She was loud and crass and demanding and his heart sped up when she danced too close.

Dedushka told him all about how men and women loved each other while they sat at the card table that served as a dinner table in his beat up apartment in Moscow. He was visiting him, stolen away from St. Petersburg for a three-day weekend with no ballet or skating or older boys looking at him like he already had a spun crown of gold they wanted to rip out of his scalp where it grew. He wasn’t even old enough to be in Juniors.

When Ded talked about women he spoke like they were above him and below him but never beside him. Yuri learned that they held the universe in their eyes and their minds and between their legs and their attitudes made them good for cooking and cleaning and teaching. Maybe Ded thought they were too smart for their own good. He looked at them even though Babushka was there, and then he looked less when she was gone, like it wasn’t fun anymore.

Yuri decided that the tacky girl that smelled like chemical peaches in ballet was the one for him because he couldn’t stand her the same way Ded couldn’t stand the young women who came into his bakery.

Anna held his hand after class and it made him sweat and want to turn away from her. Yuri decided he loved her because when she kissed him for the first time he got hard and had to go to the bathroom after the movie they had gone out to see ended. He thought about her in the stall and it didn’t work, not like it usually did, so maybe Yuri loved her too much to want to look at her.

They continued to kiss after ballet and Yuri continued to feel his stomach flip the same way it did when he went up to high in a Ferris wheel. He hated heights.

Anna told him she didn’t like him anymore because he didn’t bring her gifts like the other boys did for their girlfriends and once again, Yuri’s stomach flipped, but it was more like the way it flipped when he landed a double. Dedushka said that that was normal, that dating was exciting, and loving a woman was hard and terrifying because women where so much better than any man that walked the planet.

Yuri believed in Ded because all of his teachers were women and Coach Yakov loved a woman Yuri never met but already respected because of the way Yakov spoke about her. Yuri couldn’t wait to love a woman like that, to love her angles and lines and sharp venom tongue.

Yuri died when he was fourteen when he asked Dedushka if it was okay for two men to kiss. He had seen two boys kiss in a dirty alleyway on his way home from the grocery store and the sight made him queasy and almost drop the potatoes and milk he had. Dedushka whipped his head around from the lump of dough he was pulverizing and asked if someone had kissed him. Yuri said no. Ded said that was good.

At the rink there was a boy from America named Thomas who had crooked teeth and two years of growth ahead of Yuri but couldn’t do the right kind of spins to really succeed. Thomas grabbed his hair in the locker room and kissed him hard enough for copper to spring into his mouth. It was Georgi who pulled Thomas off because Yuri didn’t push him away because the hot fire feeling in his gut and arms and legs was inside of him too suddenly for him to react.

Yuri sped away from his locker without looking back at anyone behind him and skated laps, faster than he had ever skated, around the perimeter of the rink until sweat clouded his eyes and Yakov had to ask him if he was okay. His answer was to pull his leg above his head into a perfect Beillman and slice his hand, pinky to thumb, with the sharp of his blade. Red rubies of blood fell down his wrist and onto the ice and onto his boots while he panted and allowed smoke to fill his brain the same way spit had filled his mouth when Thomas had clacked their teeth together.

Of course he was okay, old man.

Yuri got stitched up from the rink medic and sent home with a heavy and itchy bandage for his efforts. He wasn’t allowed to skate for three days, just in case, so he remained in bed the entire time, grieving the loss of Thomas who had been kicked out of the rink for what he had done. Yuri had never been happy to stop skating but he was happy now because with his right hand bandaged up he couldn’t put it in his pants while he thought about Thomas’s hair or neck or hands. He knew it was wrong after all because that was the reason Thomas was gone.

It only took another month to die again when Dedushka walked in on him dressed in a shirt that he had stolen from Mila. It was pink and long enough on his tiny frame to be a dress.

“I’m not surprised you’re confused, what with all the sparkly costumes. It’s okay, Yuratchka.”

Yuri hadn’t felt confused until Dedushka spoke with a sad tinge in his voice.

The shirt had looked good on him but what was he doing if not living to support his family from his winnings and grants from the Kremlin so he tore the shirt off and stared at his body in the mirror instead. He was too thin and too short and he hated how his chest was flat and his hips were narrow. He could dress himself up in glitter and mesh and call himself whatever he wanted on the ice because that made him money but he wasn’t afforded the same luxury in his bedroom. He learned the hard way that those two worlds were separate, if only for the sake of Dedushka.

In Japan Yuri came to a halt, dead again, when he caught sight of Viktor slipping his hand down Yuuri’s chest in the onsen, which was definitely against the rules. Viktor’s arm didn’t stop moving, even when it was under the water, and Yuuri’s eyes were shut tight until he opened them at the same time as he opened his mouth with a little gasp that made Viktor smile and kiss into his neck.

Yuri scrambled into his closet of a room and tried to curl up into himself and forget what he had seen and how it made him feel, like a coiled spring being pressed down and trying to get free. He pushed the nausea down as far as it would go, into his hips, where it burned into a wet hardness he couldn’t ignore anymore. As he touched himself to the noises Viktor and Yuuri made at each other in the onsen he felt light-headed. With a small shout he came back to his senses and cringed when he saw the mess he had made of the weird futon he was forced to sleep on, knowing someone would find it and be able to look through him when they knew.

In the morning Yuuri wore a scarf in the rink and Viktor looked at him like he was dying. It sent Yuri into the bathroom again. He wanted to be the one to put marks on Yuuri’s body and thought about how his chest would feel, hard and muscular, under his hand. Yuri thought about Yuuri in the little stall with graffiti scrawled on the door until he came with a whimper, not a bang, into his own fist and felt revolted at himself. Yuuri would never look at him like that. Yuuri would be disgusted at him.

“It’s normal to have crushes.” Mari breathed down his neck with her spoiled breath when she caught him looking at her brother when he left.

Yuri cried in Japan only once, vowing never to let himself down like that again.

Yuri had never believed in God even though Ded dragged him to the beat down Orthodox Church around the corner from their home in Moscow every Sunday for his entire childhood. Still, he understood that “died and gone to heaven” was a phrase that suddenly meant something to him when he felt Otabek’s teeth scrape against his finger under all kinds of lights and glitter and judgement.

It was on Instagram and Twitter and skating websites before the exhibition was even complete. Half of the internet decried Otabek a pervert and the other half seemed to enjoy the idea of two kids fucking. In reality Yuri’s heaven was short lived, dead once the spit dried, because Otabek stayed within himself for days and weeks and months into their friendship. He rarely smiled or laughed, even when he talked about the trouble he got his friends into.

Heaven was burned down and rebuilt time and time again when Otabek got a girlfriend and a boyfriend and talked about sex like Yuri could relate to it all. In truth, though, Yuri couldn’t masturbate correctly because he needed fantasies about his friend and dressing up in women’s clothing to get off. Yuri knew he was the perverted one. He tried to tell the Internet to leave Otabek alone but they never did, even though his Twitter was locked and his Instagram was private. Angels crawled into Otabek’s space the way Yuri wanted to. They unlocked all his secret levels and points and collected the prizes within Otabek’s chest to both of their dismay. He fucked girls and boys that didn’t care that his last name translated to _gold_ , the color of Yuri’s hair.

The distance between them - thousands of kilometers on top of years of waiting - killed Yuri every day. These deaths were small and aching and reserved for late at night when Yuri let himself think about it. He kept all of his death and corruption created from the lingering gazes on Otabek’s tan skin in Instagram pictures pinned into one small place inside of himself and hoped desperately the feeling of bruised mushy decay wouldn’t spread into his legs or feet or lungs. It took four years of friendship for Otabek to reveal he also had the acrid smell of longing rot-breath in his throat.

In Almaty Yuri died for the last time when he put the gold dress on, sequins overlapping like plate armor and fluttering around his legs and barely-covered ass. It clung to his body in the right places and matched his hair, braided to one side like a girl’s in the way Mila taught him to tie it. Otabek played him a song in the middle of his club and then fucked him for the first time in the staff bathroom because it was nicer than the public ones.

Even though it was quiet, save for Otabek’s grunts as he tore Yuri apart at every shitty seam that enclosed his heart, there was still the ghost of the bass beat in his hazy-drunk-clouded head and he thrust back in time to the sounds in his brain that so often blocked any helpful thought but today broke clarity into him. Otabek was sweating and his pants weren’t even down all the way and they couldn’t kiss because they were back to front but Otabek’s hand lingered on his stomach and on his cock, peeking out from under the shimmery fairy dress, like it was a promise of forever. Steady and still, Otabek’s palm lay cool and hot on his body until they both came in tandem, gasping for air and each other’s attention.

Yuri lived for the first time as they fucked all summer and when Otabek said “I love you” after Yuri’s father mailed him a letter one day at the end of the season. Yuri began to live in every small look over skype and every pizza delivered from across borders and every questions Viktor asked – _are you together yet?_

At nineteen Yuri lived in the space carved out by his boyfriend, safe and comfortable, and so familiar like his own palm. He understood who he was and who he wanted to be – someone brave and smart like his own Beka and not scared and shitty like his dead selves. Now, though, Yuri lived and lived and lived.

**Author's Note:**

> Yuri is an edge lord so I intended this to also be a little over dramatic but IDK if that really works as a style. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> you can find me on tumblr under the same name

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Five (Or More) Places to Die](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11647296) by [thoughtsappear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thoughtsappear/pseuds/thoughtsappear)




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